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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29903058">So we Beat On, Boats Against the Current, Borne back Ceaselessly into the Past</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drowsy_Salamander/pseuds/Drowsy_Salamander'>Drowsy_Salamander</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Also I just finished season 3 and the Rome sidequest so no season 4 spoilers, Character Study, Gen, I SAD, I just got really caught up in thinking about Grizzop's relation to time, It's just really sad, Spoilers for Ancient Rome Sidequest (Rusty Quill Gaming), Suffice to say</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 18:53:03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,605</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29903058</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drowsy_Salamander/pseuds/Drowsy_Salamander</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Time. That was what it always came back to, wasn’t it? Time. There was never enough. It strode forwards regardless of anyone’s pleas for it to stop, gears crunching on with no care for who gets caught in their crush. Grizzop has felt time slip through his fingers his whole life. He knows what he is, he knows how limited his supply is.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>So we Beat On, Boats Against the Current, Borne back Ceaselessly into the Past</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Yes, the title is a quote from the Great Gatsby.<br/>Also, I wrote this all in one sitting so the tenses are a mess, pacing doesn't exist and all that, I just had a lot of feelings.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Time. That was what it always came back to, wasn’t it? Time. There was never enough. It strode forwards regardless of anyone’s pleas for it to stop, gears crunching on with no care for who gets caught in their crush. Grizzop has felt time slip through his fingers his whole life. He knows what he is, he knows how limited his supply is.</p><p>He wonders how other species can do it, look to a future of decades or even centuries. It’s such a massive expanse of time that stretches on and on, the minutes and days he’s living through don’t matter to him. Don’t register to him. Is that why they’re always so slow? They have all the time in the world.</p><p>Goblins don’t. Everything is immediate, it must happen now or never happen at all. Why stand around when there are things to be done? Goblins’ whole lives are a race to do something, create something, with their tiny lives. Thirty years. Thirty years to do everything, meet all the people you want to meet, create all the stuff you can, build yourself a legacy in thirty years. It’s nigh impossible. Family legacies are easier then. One generation to the next building together, passing it down. Or a whole family working together in the moment. A collective can achieve so much more so much faster in a short span of time. Goblins come in groups, in clutches, in families.</p><p>Grizzop is alone though and his time is still ticking on. He decides early on what he wants to do. Serve his new family, the temple of Artemis, for as long as he can. Get as many acts of devotion and courage and service to Artemis in. The issue is that the other paladins and clerics, they just don’t understand it. He develops a reputation for being keen or, less kindly, hot-headed and impulsive. And Grizzop can’t quite deny that because he is all of those things but wouldn’t anyone when you’re a third of the way through your life?</p><p>The temple isn’t slow precisely, but it doesn’t keep up with Grizzop. Ultimately there isn’t much for him to accomplish in Amsterdam so he packs up his meagre collection of possessions and asks to be transferred to a more lively region. His request is met by raised eyebrows and slightly exasperated sighs but he’s given an assignment in Prague. Told to talk to the university, they had a job for him. So that was that then. Grizzop gave Vesseek a fierce and short hug and goodbye which they accepted at the same speed, and then set off to Prague.  </p><p>He fell in with the London and Other London Outstanding Mercenary Group naturally. There was a problem to be solved as soon as possible and this lot seemed to be able to help him get it done even if they had a damn long name. He could admit that it was better that the-Rangers-we’re-still-working-on-the-name. And he likes this group. They’re sprinting through everything at a pace that finally almost falls into step with him.</p><p>Grizzop isn’t stupid he knows Hamid and Bertie don’t have any of the same expectations of their time as Grizzop and are only squeezing in so much in so quickly due to necessity but Grizzop barely cares. And then Bertie dies because he was so stubborn and stupid he never realised that consequences, like time, cannot be escaped. And Hamid’s sister also dies and suddenly Hamid seems more aware of the slowly descending blade of time. Grizzop watches the halfling grieve and wonders if anyone ever thought to explain to him the cruelty of a finite resource, that your lifespan is a maximum not a destination. Grizzop gets thirty years if he’s lucky. His clutch wasn’t. So that’s why it’s just him.</p><p>But Hamid’s a halfling and they can live centuries besides that, his family are <em>bankers</em>. People who never thought to be on the front lines. Grizzop doubts anyone in Hamid’s family ever thinks about how close death is, so used to being the exception to every rule including the clock. Grizzop doesn’t explain this to Hamid, he doubts Hamid would appreciate it. Instead, he distracts and pulls Hamid onwards into more stuff.</p><p>Because there’s always more to do!</p><p>Azu… Grizzop doesn’t quite understand Azu. Oh, he understands that she’s kind and loyal and a bit naïve but he can’t quite understand if that applies to her understanding of the world. She’s slow like everyone else, but she has a similar drive to him. She wants to do as much for Aphrodite as possible and Grizzop thinks that’s close enough to his desire to serve Artemis for her to understand his motivations. Even if she could be incredibly tactless about the whole thing. He knows how long he has, is intimately aware of it with every passing minute but Azu didn’t seem to realise that different species have different life expectancies until he forcibly hit her over the head with this fact.</p><p>Sasha understands it best. She’d never expected to get to twenty, she’d confessed to him while they waited in Clank’s. She’d grown up not knowing how long she had but suspecting it wouldn’t be long but then, instead of trying to jam as much as possible into that time, she’d just gone passive. No future meant no future plans and Grizzop virulently doesn’t understand that. Because you need a plan so you know just how to squeeze everything into the future you do have. Sasha gets very defensive when Grizzop tells her this, says that not everything is as simple as he always put things.</p><p>That was something Grizzop got told a lot. And sure, maybe there were complexities and nuance and all that tosh but at the end of the day, a course still needed to be set, actions still needed to be undertaken and a lot of the time, this complexity is unnecessary and obfuscates the simplicity at the centre of the matter. And once the base is understood, Grizzop feels fully righteous in pulling out his bow and ending the problem.</p><p>There’s no sense in beating about the bush or jus sitting and twiddling thumbs. There was work to be done and damn it Grizzop would see it done before he was gone. And that was why when the agonising choice between Vesseek and what was right came, Grizzop made his choice in a heartbeat. The others took so long to decide what they were doing but as much as it hurt Grizzop, he only ever made fast decisions and he <em>stuck </em>to them. There wasn’t room for second guessing and doubts so instead he destroys everything he can before getting help with the river.</p><p>He appreciates the orcs. They aren’t as efficient or fast as goblins but there’s no dillydallying with them. They’re straightforward in a way that Grizzop resonates with. In a way Wilde utterly refuses to be. Wilde is aggravating on so many layers but Wilde penchant for dodging around a point with flowery language, taking as long as possible to say <em>anything </em>was definitely up there. Grizzop knew non-goblins found him blunt but from where he was standing, the opposite seemed infinitely worse. Still, Wilde is helpful and Grizzop is more sympathetic when he finds out the man was being crushed by a curse and he clearly was trying to accomplish as much as possible which Grizzop can appreciate.</p><p>When he leaves to go to Rome, he almost respects Wilde a tiny bit. Almost.</p><p>And Rome is terrible but he’s barely there to appreciate its terribleness before he’s in the other plane. And this is what he appreciates about the mercenary group. Well, actually there were many, many things he appreciated about them but one of them was that the work just did not stop. There were no breaks, no rests, no wastes of time. They were just continually productive.</p><p>The plane itself is strange to him because it warps time. And yes, it’s come back around to time. Grizzop had never felt as horrified as in Newton’s study when he realised he was loosing even more of his precious supply of time, falling out of sync with a world that would not be merciful for that dissonance but here was a plane that would do the reverse. Give back time. Of course, it was a very serious and dangerous situation but Grizzop couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit giddy. It was like he was stealing from the universe. He could spend a month in there and come back out again and have his official age be higher than he ever thought possible.</p><p>Of course, the universe doesn’t like being tricked. It set out the rules and in those rules, goblins do not get much time. So, mere hours after he thinks about the impossibility of being forty, his hourglass runs out. The thirty years cut down to ten with a spear.</p><p>And a part of Grizzop thinks this is fitting. Sasha is watching him go down and she never expected to live to twenty and there’s Grizzop who knew he would go down before thirty and he’s dying. It could have been Sasha. But didn’t Sasha deserve that time, to live past twenty, to thirty, to forty, onwards and on, past anything Grizzop could have ever reached.</p><p>Ten years. A third of his promised time. It was still so much more than it could’ve been and Grizzop managed to fit so much in. Time was a river that pushed everyone forwards and Grizzop had finally drowned after fighting the current.  </p>
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